BBC Charter Review (Communications Committee Report)
Debate between Lord Puttnam and Baroness Neville-Rolfe
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I cannot anticipate what the White Paper will say. I have tried, partly by encouraging the usual channels, to have a debate today and to make it clear that there will be a debate on the charter to ensure that there is a process going forward.
Lord Puttnam
I ask a quick but quite important question. I listened very carefully to the remarks by the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne—there are of course countervailing arguments one way or another for the charter, as against a legislative solution. I put to the Minister that, as we watch the retreat from the possibility of privatisation of Channel 4, I have no doubt whatsoever that this retreat is occasioned by the fact that it would require Parliament’s agreement and that the Government are fully aware that they would never get it. I would suggest in fact that the security of Channel 4 is created by its legislative status—why would that not be true of the BBC?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
No decisions have been taken on Channel 4. Obviously I hear what the noble Lord has said; equally, there are arguments on the other side, which I will not weary the House with repeating.
The Committee’s report says that there should be no reduction in the scale and scope of the BBC and that it should not restrict itself to content that is not provided commercially. The Government does not believe that “public service” simply means “minority interest”. The BBC is, as we have all agreed, able to take creative risks that other broadcasters cannot and we certainly want this to continue. It includes the important roles of supporting local democracy and reflecting diversity, as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford.
Several people spoke very helpfully on the issue of diversity—the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of Tradeston, and the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin. The BBC is for everyone and must serve and represent all audiences. The totemic programmes that were mentioned are very important and the new BBC1 drama “Undercover” is another one. Noble Lords can expect to see diversity addressed in the White Paper. Ed Vaizey recently responded to an important debate on that subject in another place and I will pass on the kind comments from noble Lords about his role as a champion of diversity. It is not, in conclusion, for the Government to tell the BBC what programmes it should make, but diversity is of course important.
I also noted with great interest the comments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford in relation to religious programming. Programming about faith and religion has a vital role and, I believe, is an important part of the BBC’s distinctiveness. The BBC itself has acknowledged the importance of distinctiveness.
The BBC is of course a public service and, as a former public servant, I know that it is essential that the BBC delivers value for money for the licence fee payer. The public need to be assured that it is well-managed and that every pound is spent well.
The BBC’s commercial activities are an issue that we are considering as part of the charter review and, to reassure noble Lords, we certainly do not believe that the BBC should refrain at all from commercial activity. This is another issue that we will address in the White Paper.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Best, and to all colleagues for their contributions to an invigorating, if at times challenging, debate. The Communications Committee, along with the whole House, has made a big contribution to the charter review process. Today’s debate adds richly to the deliberations by the Government in the coming weeks and months.
In their concluding comments, the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, focused on a range of issues that have been raised today in relation to independence and transparency. I can only say that the Government recognise the importance of an independent BBC and will be setting out their plans to that end in the White Paper.
The BBC—this is common ground—matters a great deal to us all. It is hugely admired around the world and something of which our country can be very proud. The Government want it to be the very best that it can be. The purpose of the charter review and next month’s White Paper is to ensure that it is fit for purpose, able to thrive and serves each and every licence payer and their families outstandingly well.
National Lottery
Debate between Lord Puttnam and Baroness Neville-Rolfe
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
My Lords, I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Holmes on securing this debate to celebrate 21 years of the National Lottery and I thank him for his kind words. Both his success on sports and disability bodies and his achievements in the field of sport are really remarkable—the only Briton to win six gold medals, in his case for swimming, at a single Paralympics. Both have benefited enormously over the last 21 years from the National Lottery.
I also congratulate my noble friend the Duke of Wellington, whose DNA is part of our national heritage, and the noble Lord, Lord Beith, on their excellent maiden speeches—a taste of the vim, vigour and wit they will bring to our House.
Like my noble friend Lady Bottomley, I love the Maclise picture of the Battle of Waterloo in the Royal Gallery—and, indeed, the one of Trafalgar—but I always feel faintly embarrassed when I bring French guests here and show them round the Palace.
I have to declare a special interest. I was working with Sir John Major at No. 10 when the National Lottery was launched in 1994. He said on the occasion of the first draw:
“The country will be a lot richer because of the lottery. It is in every sense the people’s lottery”.
It was, as many have said, a brave move and it has been an amazing legacy. I was delighted to hear the tributes from my noble friends Lord True and Lord Cormack, and from my noble friend Lady Bottomley, who has done so much for heritage. She and others have rightly mentioned so many others who have contributed to the lottery over the years. Successes always have many parents, quite rightly.
To try to respond to the philosophical question put by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, some 70% of all UK adults play the lottery, no doubt in the hope that they might become a multimillionaire. It is regressive and the chances are slim, but it is a free country and people enjoy playing the game and the thrill of even a small win from the annual pot—£3.9 billion last year—of tax-free prize money. They also have the satisfaction of contributing with every ticket purchased to the national Exchequer via lottery duty, which currently amounts to £870 million a year, helping to pay for everything from schools to overseas aid.
They also play in the knowledge that they are thereby giving to good causes. As many have said, since 1994 more than £34 billion has been raised for arts, sports, heritage and charities in the United Kingdom. More than 464,000 projects have been funded—an average of more than 700 in each parliamentary constituency. These projects have together made a huge difference, as we have heard. Maybe this responds to the noble Lord: I am not aware of the kind of research that he inquired about, but I will talk to the Gambling Commission and to Camelot and, if I may, I will write to him after the debate.
In sport, funding from the National Lottery helped deliver the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and played a huge role in our medal success. The lottery funds more than 1,000 elite athletes, including our medal hopefuls in their preparations for Rio. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, about the importance of funding elite disabled athletes. Indeed, UK Sport is directly investing £355 million into summer Olympic and Paralympic sports during the current Rio cycle—an increase of 7% into Olympic sports and of 45% into Paralympic sports. The lottery has also helped to finance a vast array of community sports facilities.
Last week, I had the pleasure to hear one of our greatest sporting heroes, Sir Chris Hoy, speak at an event celebrating the anniversary of the National Lottery. Sir Chris spoke of how lottery funding enabled British cycling to become the best in the world. Since 2009, Sport England alone has invested more than £52 million of National Lottery money in the sport of cycling, allowing an extraordinary attention to scientific detail and leading to many successive incremental improvements in technique. It has supported facilities such as the Manchester and London velodromes and a National Trust cycling trails project, and there have been hundreds of small grants to help local cycling clubs.
In the House today we have a number of elite sportsmen and sportswomen. It has been good to hear how the lottery has benefited all kinds of sport, from rugby, where I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, to swimming and cricket. I pay particular tribute to my noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint for the tireless work she has done, and continues to do, for women’s cricket—and I note what the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, said about women’s sport more generally.
Today is a good day for sport because Tracey Crouch, a great sportswoman herself and Sports Minister, published her strategy, with a foreword by the Prime Minister himself. It provides a way forward for public support for sport in the UK, drawing on the strengths of the lottery. Sport England will now be able to fund projects to promote wider physical activity as well as other sport. I will pass the comments of my noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint to Sport England.
I pay particular tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, for agreeing to accept the challenge of chairing the independent working group on a new duty of care for participants in sport, which we also announced this morning. I am delighted that the Premier League has agreed to contribute more than £100 million to grass-roots football, which was a concern of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. This will greatly strengthen football at community level across the country both in terms of improving facilities and running projects that will have a positive impact on people’s lives.
Lord Puttnam
Is that an additional £100 million or the £100 million—because the figure I had was that it is putting in only 1.8% of its revenue?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
It is £100 million. I think that it may have been trailed before, which is perhaps what the noble Lord is referring to, but I will clarify the position.
The lottery has provided much needed resources for the arts. It has supported national institutions, many of which have already been mentioned, including the Royal Opera House, and community arts, as well as British film, which the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, mentioned, with a fitting tribute to the work of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, at the BFI. To give ballast to the powerful comments of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, lottery-funded films have won 32 Baftas and 14 Oscars.
A few months ago, I toured the lottery-funded Royal College of Music with Madame Peng, the Chinese First Lady, enjoying some wonderful performances and visiting its intriguing museum. This is one of our many world-class institutions, and it was a pleasure to showcase it to international dignitaries.
Turning to heritage, funding through the Heritage Lottery Fund has helped us as a nation to commemorate so many of our important anniversaries, including the First World War centenary. There is a very diverse range of funded heritage projects—that is very much a strength—and that represents the truly national nature of the lottery. As someone with a huge passion for cathedrals and churches, I was delighted to hear from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester. I agree with him about Chester Cathedral and Beverley Minster. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, rightly spoke of Lincoln Cathedral. As they said, what is good about the HLF is that it attracts matching funding from businesses and others in local communities, so that the money goes twice as far.
The noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, and the noble Lord, Lord Beith, rightly said that it was important that we have simple, non-bureaucratic arrangements for distribution. In fact, there is some good practice, although others have expressed concerns, I think notably in the sports area. I should add that I had the fortune of visiting the Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, where lottery funding has helped save this important collection.
One of my new responsibilities at DCMS is the National Archives, another recipient of lottery funding, and the noble Lord, Lord Beith, will be glad to hear that I admired the restoration of a large-scale map of Berwick when I visited. At the micro level, Heritage Lottery Funding has helped to create the wonderful Blake mosaics under the arches over the river in Lambeth. It is worth noting that more than 40% of funding from the HLF goes to the voluntary and community sector.
My noble friend Lord True and the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, spoke passionately about the case for some overseas heritage sites attracting lottery funding support. I have always wanted to visit the Lines of Torres Vedras. At present, the Heritage Lottery Fund funds projects based only in the UK, as I think noble Lords know. However, funding may be available for activities outside the UK, including museum visits or travel to heritage sites. To date, the Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded more than £60 million to First World War projects in the UK. In addition, the Big Lottery Fund’s Heroes Return programme has enabled more than 58,000 World War II veterans to return with their families to the places where they served—so there is some activity, though admittedly at the edges.
From parks to village halls, sports clubs and charities, National Lottery funding has been at the heart of many wonderful community initiatives. Only 1% of grants are for £1 million or more. The great majority, some 71%, are for £10,000 or under. Seventy per cent of funding goes outside London and the south-east. Forty per cent of lottery good cause money—£670 million last year—goes to the Big Lottery Fund, our single largest distributor. This funding provides invaluable support to charities, community and voluntary projects up and down the country, such as pensioner groups, play schemes, allotments, community centres, scout huts and, indeed, the Clapham bandstand.
My noble friend the Duke of Wellington dared to offer an early comment on the machinery of government. He will be interested to know that the Big Lottery Fund was once within DCMS but that the sponsorship is now split with the Cabinet Office. I will certainly factor in his views in our ongoing consideration. I will also ask the distributors to see whether their administrative costs could be further reduced. These are currently set at a maximum of 5% for grant processing costs and 8% for administration costs. I note what he said about remuneration levels for distributor board members. Lottery money should, as far as possible, go to good causes.
In answer to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, as set out in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Autumn Statement, there are no plans to reduce the Big Lottery Fund’s allocation. The fund will continue to receive 40% of National Lottery good cause money; sport, arts and heritage will continue to receive 20%. The noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, asked about regional distribution. I have already said that our most recent figures show that 70% of good cause funding in England has been outside London and the south-east since the lottery began—I am happy to share more detailed figures with him and other noble Lords after the debate—though of course many national charities and bodies have their head offices in London but use lottery money outside, so that complicates the picture.
To pick up on a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Beith, since 1995 more than £331 million of lottery money has been spent on heritage projects in the north-east. Distributors run specific programmes, such as the recent Doncaster activity pilot, to encourage applications from areas that currently receive lower levels of funding.
My noble friend Lord Holmes and the noble Lords, Lord Addington, Lord Pendry and Lord Stevenson, all expressed concern about competition for the National Lottery from society lotteries, particularly so-called umbrella brands such as the Health Lottery and People’s Postcode Lottery. In March, as many noble Lords will know, the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, then under a very distinguished chairman, published its report on society lotteries, which covered many issues raised by noble Lords today, including caps on prizes and expenses, betting on lotteries and requiring large society lotteries to pay tax in the same way as the National Lottery. The Government are currently taking expert advice from the Gambling Commission on all those issues.
The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, asked about additionality. The Government are committed to that principle. Safeguards are in place, including the requirement for distributors to say in their annual report and accounts how the additionality principle has been applied. I am also a fan of transparency, which he mentioned.
Last month, Ed Vaizey—my ministerial colleague at the DCMS—unveiled a commemorative image celebrating 21 years of the National Lottery at the Lowry in Manchester, itself another great National Lottery-funded institution. The image has recently finished a tour of other National Lottery-funded venues, and shows over 50 projects, celebrating the great breadth and diversity of lottery funding support across the arts, heritage, sport, charity and voluntary sectors.
In celebrating 21 years of the National Lottery, we are celebrating not only our Olympians—some are here today—and Oscar winners; we also celebrate the achievements of those in our communities who, with support from the National Lottery, have volunteered their time to make our country a better place—people such as Edna Smith from Leicester, who has been awarded a special achievement award for her work with the charity Home-Start, which provides support to parents experiencing difficulties.
The lottery is an established and popular British institution, for all the reasons we have discussed. Unlike the English State Lottery, closed down in 1826, it has become part of the fabric of our national life. Criticisms could be made but let us remember that, unlike many things involving government, it is entirely voluntary. We should recognise the pleasure that it gives in a sympathetic and positive spirit. I thank my noble friend for giving us the opportunity to set all this on the record today.
BBC Charter Review
Debate between Lord Puttnam and Baroness Neville-Rolfe
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My noble friend will be interested to know that I made a brief reference to that in the Statement. I think it is called contestable funding. It is part of the consultation and it would in principle allow new entrants, such as small Welsh production companies, to play a greater part in the creation of TV and radio programmes and online content in the future.
Lord Puttnam (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Baroness is quite right: the world is changing rapidly. Somewhat to my surprise, it has been very widely reported this week that the UK has come top in the world for its use of, and reputation for, soft power. Would she like to suggest any other organisation in this country that contributes more to that reputation than the BBC?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
The simple answer is no. I think that the existence of the BBC World Service and all that it does was absolutely key to that assessment.